Sarah Stern
Moss
Elias Wolf Pressburger
Sophie Pressburger
My great grandparents.
Heinz and Barbara take us up the hill
To the Jewish cemetery
It’s raining
Barbara says, “The graveyard is beautiful in every season.”
The stones take us further and further back
The 1600s
The all-shades-of-green moss
Cover everything
We are under water
In a land of gorgeous fish and names
A black chill rises and thick vines roar
Write my name here.
I could have been a middle-aged woman in Berlin.
Boots and jeans, kinky just right. Gluehwein.
I cry for the numbers.
Fish have no end—see them in this small green.
Is this what it means—to see the past in front of you?
Even the still-visible smashed glass is lyrical
Even in death you try to take from us
But you can’t
We are on the other side already
Ha—bastards.
Mommy, I feel you here
I’m remembering how you told me you’d play,
Run and hear the church bells
I see the village below, the pastel houses
Fields, the fields you spoke of
How your papa would come home from
A week of cattle dealing
And he’d ask you—
“Who did you beat up this week?”
Because you were strong
And he loved you.
Sarah Stern is the author of But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock, 2014) and Another Word for Love (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in The American Dream, The Man Who Ate His Book: The Best of Ducts.org, Epiphany, Freefall, New Verse News and Verse Daily, among other journals. She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Poetry Award. She graduated from Barnard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. You can see more of her work at sarahstern.me.